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Why Intuit Is More Innovative Than Your Company

It’s lunchtime at IntuitIntuit in Mountain View, Calif., and the company’s almost-daily ritual is under way in the cafeteria: office hours with Scott Cook. Intuit’s billionaire cofounder perches on a stool in his everyday wear of running shoes, a button-down oxford shirt, canvas jeans and a Swatch as four product managers explain their new idea, code-named Peppermint: an online marketplace like Craigslist that would allow hair salons, landscapers and dentists, or any of the 5 million small businesses that use Intuit’s QuickBooks accounting software, to connect with potential customers under the halo of being “Intuit-certified service providers.”

On a table between Cook and the Peppermint quartet is a giant piece of white oak tag divided into little boxes labeled with the big questions: What’s your idea? What’s your vision? What’s your leap-of-faith assumption? What’s your hypothesis? The upper rows of boxes have fluorescent pink and yellow Post-it Notes in the m scribbled with answers.

There are dozens of such projects and experiments going on across the company. Cook meets monthly with 14 or 15 similar teams, meaning that most of his workday lunches are occupied by one brainstorming session or another. Right now this one isn’t going so well. Cook gently interrogates with his lips pursed and hands held out over the oak tag.

How are you going to vet the service providers?

We could use credit scores or Yelp ratings.

Okay. How would you show if there’s buyer dissatisfaction?

We could let people know by looking at how often their customers switch.

But they’ve already switched. That’s a lagging indicator.

We know people are interested in the service.

To prove the market interest, the quartet had set up a GoogleGoogle AdWords campaign, spending a couple of hundred bucks on a text ad that ran next to searches for dentists, hair salons and landscapers. It read: “Intuit-recommended service providers to meet your everyday needs” and linked to a dummy Web page thanking the visitor for being part of a study making QuickBooks better. They figured 10% of the ad click-throughs would yield a sign-up. It turned out 20% did.

That’s good, replies Cook, but what does “Intuit-recommended” mean? How do we reliably vouch for them? You really have to test what you can deliver. It’s not the right test. I’m not sure I believe the results if it comes up positive.

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Nice piece of cheerleading but it should also be pointed out that their customer service is rock bottom. Their products, while essentially good, still have serious flaws and if there were any other real viable alternatives for small business software they would lose market share quickly. It is just that there competition is worse then they are. There is a great deal of frustation in the accounting community with their products, pricing and support. It is lack of viablie alternatives that keeps them on top.